with user feedback data

6.2

Enabling youth participation with user feedback data

Not all approaches to evaluation, auditing, monitoring and assessment enable youth participation. To support youth participation they must, as a minimum, gather user feedback data. Collecting ensures the views of young people are captured as part of the evaluation. This involves exploring topics like:

→ What do young people say they enjoy and value about the youth information service?

→ What do young people identify as the strengths and weaknesses of the service?

→ How do young people believe the service could be improved?

What sort of youth information do young people say they want and need?

→ What sorts of youth information services, products or topics would they like to have access to?

User feedback data can be gathered from existing users as well as potential service users (young people who do not currently use the service). Other forms of data, such as engagement data (who takes part and how?) and impact or outcomes data (what difference does the service make?) are all important parts of evaluation and assessment. However, without user feedback data, an evaluation does not include the views of young people, and will usually not be a method of enabling youth participation.

User feedback data needs to be systematically analysed after it has been gathered. This is a key step in any evaluative process. For a specific evaluation or assessment initiative, this is usually done at the end after all the data has been gathered. However, in the case of monitoring, when service user feedback is collected on an ongoing basis, data should be analysed on a regular basis.

Practical methods for gathering user feedback data

There is a wide range of tools that can be used to gather feedback from young people during evaluation and assessment. Some of the most common are based on social research such as questionnaires, interviews and focus groups.

Creative workshops and methods can also be highly successful. Participants take part in a series of creative activities, based around the theme of the evaluation, and the discussions are recorded as part of data collection. These methods can provide a more interactive and fun way of engaging with young people and are more attractive to a range of different young people. Examples include theatre and storytelling workshops, video-making and photography, and arts workshops.

This photo was taken at a Lego making workshop the European Youth Conference held during the Czech Presidency of The Council of the European Union. Participants in the workshops were asked to design spaces and places for accessing youth information about sustainability. During the workshop facilitators discussed and recorded the ideas young people came up with whilst they built their models.

Public installations can be used to gather user feedback. An object is placed in the youth information centre which young people can interact with to give their views and opinions. This can be as simple as a comments box, through which they can post their comments and feedback on the service. But more interesting and attractive approaches can be developed. The photo below shows a “wishing and feelings” tree. Anyone who passes by is invited to share their wishes and feelings by writing a comment on paper and tying it to the tree. Comments are regularly read by service managers to gain feedback. Monitoring tools can be used to gather day-to-day user feedback on youth information services’ work. A simple feedback tool can be used at the end of every activity, or published regularly on websites and social media channels. By using the same tool or set of tools for all projects and activities, feedback for the whole youth information service can be gathered, and different activities or pieces of content can be compared. Findings can be regularly analysed and used to inform the planning and management of the youth information service on an ongoing basis. Monitoring tools are usually simple and easy to use, to encourage more young people to give feedback through them.

(The text above was auto-translated to English, original text is in Dutch)

WAT WAT is a youth information service based in the Flemish Community of Belgium. They use a simple tool based around smiley faces on their website as a way of monitoring service user data.

Further resources

Designing effective evaluation, assessment and monitoring is beyond the scope of this guidebook. There are many other aspects that need to be considered alongside the role of youth participation. These resources can provide further support on evaluation design:

Ondřej Bárta - Evaluation in the Youth Field Kaz Stuart, Lucy Maynard and Rouncefield Evaluation Practice for Projects with Young People A Guide to Creative Research The EU-Council of Europe Youth Partnership T-Kit 10: Educational Evaluation in Youth Work Save the Children - Consultation Toolkit Save the Children - Evaluation Handbook Artworks - Creative Evaluation Toolkit